Volodymyr Zelenskiy has struggled to persuade US Republicans to support a $61bn military aid package for Ukraine on a trip to Washington DC, with objectors insisting on White House concessions on border security as a condition for a deal.
The Ukrainian president addressed members of the Senate in a closed 90-minute meeting on Tuesday morning, but afterwards key Republicans repeated that they wanted to see a crackdown on immigration between the US and Mexico in return for supporting the package.
Speaking afterwards, Lindsey Graham, a senator for South Carolina, told reporters that he had told Zelenskiy that the problem was “nothing to do with you”. He added: “I said: ‘You’ve done everything anybody could ask of you. This is not your problem here.’”
The senior Republican went on to accuse the White House of having failed to tackle the southern border issue and called for “the commander in chief” – Joe Biden – to become personally involved in the negotiations.
Senate Republicans last week blocked an emergency aid package primarily for Ukraine and Israel after conservatives complained at the exclusion of immigration policy changes they had demanded as part of the package.
Zelenskiy sought to reassure senators concerned about whether US military aid would be wasted because of corruption, Mike Rounds, a Republican, told CNN, and that Ukraine needed more air defence systems to support its counteroffensives.
Senior Democrats, meanwhile, expressed frustration with the lack of progress. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, said “The one person happiest right now about the gridlock in Congress is Vladimir Putin. He is delighting in the fact that Donald Trump’s border policies are sabotaging military aid to Ukraine.”
The Ukrainian president then moved on to a meeting with Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrat House minority leader, and after that with the recently elected Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who has been relatively sceptical about further financial support for Ukraine.
After their meeting, Johnson complained that the White House was asking Congress to approve the spending of billions of dollars “with no appropriate oversight, without a clear strategy to win”.
Johnson added that “our first condition on any national security supplemental spending package is about our own national security first” but he also insisted that the US did stand with Zelenskiy “against Putin’s brutal invasion”.
Zelenskiy posted a picture on X, formerly Twitter, of him addressing senators, saying he had had “a friendly and candid conversation”. He emphasised the importance of US military aid in his country’s fight against Russia.
Moscow said it was watching developments closely. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, said that “tens of billions of dollars” already provided by Washington had failed to turn the tide of war and more money would make little difference. Zelenskiy’s authority was being undermined by the failures, he added.
Congress is due to break for the year on Friday and there appeared little prospect of a breakthrough that would allow a funding package to be passed before then – meaning that negotiations will have to pick up in the new year at a time when the amounts available to Ukraine are running short.
Last week, Shalanda Young, the White House’s director of the office of management and budget, said that the Pentagon had used up 97% of the $62.3bn Ukraine allocations previously authorised by Congress, while the state department has none of its $4.7bn remaining.
Zelenskiy is due to hold a private meeting with Biden and a joint press conference in the afternoon. The White House has previously signalled it is willing to make concessions on the Mexico border issue as it tries to get the funding package through.
Adrienne Watson, spokesperson for the White House national security council, said Russia believes that “a military deadlock through the winter will drain western support for Ukraine”, ultimately handing Moscow the advantage.
Newly declassified US intelligence concluded that the war had cost Russia 315,000 dead and injured troops, amounting to nearly 90% of the personnel it had before the war, started in February 2022.
In Ukraine, the country’s biggest mobile phone network, Kyivstar, was badly hit on Tuesday by what appeared to be the largest cyber-attack of the war with Russia so far. Phone signals, the internet and some of Kyiv region’s air alert system were knocked out, in an attack that the company’s chief executive was “a result of” the war with Russia.
Ukrainian sources indicated that the attack was not financially motivated, but destructive in nature, and it was unclear who precisely was responsible. The country’s SBU intelligence service said it was investigating whether the attack had been directed by one of Russia’s intelligence agencies.
